Fear is the single greatest enemy of survival

[phantom power]

I've heard it said that the true opposite of love is fear. Fear is the enemy of community.

All the talk about patriotism, about supporting the troops, is just lip service. This is the most unpatriotic crowd I have ever been a part of. What they are against is community. Every sentence is devoid of empathy. Every finger-wag is aimed directly at an American who can’t afford health insurance, who hasn’t had a raise on their minimum-wage job in four years. Even as they rail against a statement that the president never really made, they are talking about tearing America down and leaving something meaner and greedier in its place. They’re radicals—radicals who’ve gone over the edge and are trying to make their radicalism mainstream.

But is that really true? Are they the monsters I think they are when the lights are down and the demagogues are predictably spreading their demagoguery? They roar like monsters in the darkened halls of the Forum, but I look at the people around me, milling forward in the embrace of waist-high concrete barriers to their left and right, trying to get back to their cars, or their buses, or their hotels. They’re grumbling about the blisters caused by their good pair of shoes. They’re hungry. They’re tired. But they are unmistakably human beings. That bald man whose wattle hangs down over his shirt like a meaty necktie, that woman whose perm looks as arid and dry as a tumbleweed. These are peoples’ grandparents. Real human beings will weep when they die (and for most of this ancient crowd, the day that they die will probably be sometime soon). They’re scared of the imaginary world of the 1950s in their heads dying forever, and the problem is that scared people make dumb choices.

It always comes back to fear. Fear is the single greatest enemy of survival. When you’re afraid, you can’t think ahead, you can’t plan. You try to get out of immediate danger. You climb a tree when a bear is chasing you. You dive to the ground when a snow-blind 18-wheeler is skidding right at you. You open your mouth and scream when your foot gets caught under a rock at the bottom of a river. You get mauled and eaten. You get crushed into toothpaste. You drown, and they never find your body. There is nothing left of you that resembles you anymore, and it’s all because of fear. And fear is understandable. Fear happens to all of us, there’s no shame in succumbing to a momentary burst of fear.

But when you choose to live your life in fear, you lose that most essential thing that makes you human. When you support George W. Bush’s Patriot Act, as the woman to my left with the cowboy hat full of Bush/Cheney buttons probably did, you’re supporting fear. When you try to take food away from starving people, or deny good students access to higher education, or steal choices away from the next generation of women, you may not be a monster, but you are making monstrous choices.

I look at this crowd of people hobbling forward to parties and sleep and breakfast and smiles and tears, and I think about the fact that just hours before, I was sitting in the antiseptic, airport-style Prayer Room high above this street, holding hands with J.B. I think about what he said about pride, and I wish that he’d kept reading chapter 4 of James. In the next verses, 13 and 14, there are words that I think are much more appropriate to this group of people who have traveled from all around the country to lie to everyone about what they believe so that their fear can take root and fester and spread. I wish we could all hold hands with J.B. in a huge circle, all around the militarized downtown of Tampa, with the swarm of buzzing, crazy-making helicopters humming in the gelatinous Tampa air overhead, and listen to him read those next lines in his friendly, quavering voice:

Come now, you who say, “Today or tomorrow we will go to such and such a city, and spend a year there and engage in business and make a profit.” Yet you do not know what your life will be like tomorrow. You are just a vapor that appears for a little while and then vanishes away.”

http://www.thestranger.com/seattle/stuck-in-a-room-with-mitt-romney/Content?oid=14623016

[ZombieHorde]

1. One would think death is the single greatest enemy of survival.

I try to picture the mugger this woman imagines. He’s either black or Latino, he’s carrying a knife or a gun, he’s got gold teeth, and he’s stretching his body to something thinner than five inches around to hide behind one of those trees. It’s not crime this woman is afraid of, it’s vampires. It’s superstitious thought. It’s the kind of thinking that overrides logic in place of something you’ve seen on TV.

The author gets a little silly here.

[randome]

2. If the author had stopped at something like...

...panicking in an emergency will likely make your situation worse, that would have been sufficient, I think.

[jwirr]

3. In a very small way I am living the idiocy of fear the last couple days. I got a ringworm somewhere

and my family is acting like it is the end of the world. The doctor said I would no longer be infective after I started treatment. I have not been allowed to even get close to my great grandchildren for 3 days. Fear drives us to do things we should never have to do.